Wearables - Page 2

E Ink Holdings announced a strategic partnership with Chinese LCD panel maker Jiangxi Holitech Technology. E Ink will collaborate with JiangXi to expand the use of EPD displays to mobile phones, wearable devices, retail electronic labels and digital price-tags.

E Ink hopes that this new agreement will allow them to boost their market share in China's e-paper display market. E Ink will supply displays and modules to Jiangxi - and will also provide advanced technologies to help Jiangxi develop E Ink based devices.

Looksee's announced the smart Eyecatcher E Ink Bracelet earlier this year, and now the company launched a successful crowdfunding campaign to fund this interesting device. The company's goal was to raise $75,000 and they quickly met the goal.

The Eyecatcher is a smart wearable device that has a large curved E Ink display (150 PPI) that can show custom images and phone notifications. The display is always on, and the device should last for months on a single charge - depending on the number of times you will change the display. If you update once every hour it will last for a year.

A few weeks ago Polyera unveiled their first product, the Wove Band - which is based on the company's OTFT flexible backplane technology. Now Polyera revealed the technical specification of this interesting device.

The Wove Band will use a touch E Ink display that is 30 x 156 mm in size with a 1040x200 resolution. Other features include a 1Ghz dual-core CPU, 4GB of storage, 512 MB of RAM and a 230 mAh battery. The Wove runs on Polyera's Wove OS which is based on Android 5.1.

Polyera unveiled their first product, the Wove Band. This smartband device is truly flexible and uses the company's OTFT (organic-TFT) technology flexible backplane technology and an E Ink display.

Polyera will start shipping samples in December to developers and artists, and the commercial launch is planned for mid-2016.

In 2013, CST introduced the CST-01 ultra-thin, flexible E Ink watch. The company later raised over $300,000 in a kickstarter campaign, offering each watch for $129.

Unfortunatly, CST faced production problems, and due to low component yields, and actual price of each watch climbed to $260. CST decided to change its manufacturor (Flextronics), but it is almost out of money.

A month ago we reported about a new crowdfunding campaign by FES that aims to develop a smartwatch covered with E Ink panels. It turns out that Sony is behind this campaign - they created the fake FES company just to experiment with this idea and see whether it could become viral.

Sony did not confirm a release date for this watch. The campaign wasn't a great success, with 150 orders totaling 3.5 million yet (almost $30,000).

China-based GEAK launched a new watch called the GEAK Watch II, that uses two round displays - an LCD and an E Ink panel, on on top of the other. The transparent LCD sits on top of the E Ink. This enables a very efficient battery life - and GEAK says the battery will last for a week with light use or 3-4 days with "moderate" use.

Both displays are 1.36" in diameter (320x320 resolution, 254 PPI, apparently on both the E Ink and the LCD). The watch connects to your phone via Bluetooth and also includes several trackers (heart rate, air quality, step counter and more).

The FES Watch is a new crowdfunding campaign in Japan that aims to develop a smartwatch that is covered with E Ink panels - not only for the watch face but also for the straps. This allows you to reach a high degree of customization while keeping power consumption low.

According to the company's plan, the FES Watch will ship in May 2015.

E-reader maker Onyx is entering the Smartwatch market, and the company is showing a prototype watch with a 1.56" E Ink display. This watch has an always-on display (enabled by the fact that E Ink display do not consume power if the display is static). In the prototype there are 3 buttons and the display is not touch-enabled, but future version may include a touch display.

The Onyx watch will sync with your phone via Bluetooth and also include a fitness tracker. A GPS may be added to future versions. This device will not reach the market until 2015 "at the earliest".

E Ink is showing a new flexible wrap-around display aimed towards smart watch applications. The idea is that this will be used to cover the whole smart watch, and can be used to change the entire watch design.

Besides the design, this smart watch (band?) can display information, notifications, heart rate, etc.